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Open Government Blog

On August 29, OPM hosted the group Drupal4Gov for an event about open source technology and the Federal Digital Government Strategy. More than 100 people attended the event. They discussed how agencies can use open source applications (e.g., Drupal or WordPress) for:

Managing their technology more effectively and with lower costs

Creating websites that are easy to use on different devices and screen sizes through mobile apps and new techniques such as responsive design

Deputy Chief of Staff Justin Johnson and Chief Information Officer Matthew Perry gave an overview of OPM's work and then introduced the two keynote speakers. Gray Brooks, Senior API Strategy at the Digital Services Innovation Center, talked about the impact of the Digital Government Strategy, and Joshua Davis, founder of Mil-OSS, spoke of the Defense Department's work in making open source software secure.

After the keynotes, there were conference sessions on data and security, policy, and advanced technical topics, as well as a hands-on workshop.

The workshop was the second meeting of the Drupal4Gov Ladder community, a governmentwide group of developers who meet regularly to create open source modules and applications for free distribution to government agencies. Over 50 participants broke up into 3 groups. Beginners created their first Drupal site. Others learned more advanced techniques. Still others collaborated to create a new Drupal module: in under 3 hours, they decided on features for the module, designed it, tested it, and distributed it for other members of the open source community to use in their sites. This was the Drupal4Gov Ladder community’s first successful effort in creating and distributing a shared module.

The comments participants offered in the closing session were overwhelmingly positive. They were excited about the knowledge they'd gained and their contributions to sharing knowledge among government agencies. They were very grateful to OPM for hosting the event – as one attendee put it: "OPM hit it out of the park hosting us and providing a great event."

As you will see in the report, we've primarily focused our efforts on informing and training our own OPM employees. We're also de-cluttering our website and beginning to ensure our documents are written in plain language for everyone. However, we'd like your help. Keep an eye out for a challenge we will issue for you to identify OPM documents we should make easier to understand using plain language.

Until then, we'd love to hear your comments on the report and how you think we’re doing with the plain writing initiative. Please leave us your comments in – you guessed it – the "Comments" section.

It's hard to believe almost two years have already passed since we first published our Open Government Plan! We're writing version 2, which we'll publish in April. We'd love to hear your ideas – please drop us a note in the comments section.

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